Rich Neal: “Mr. Speaker, let me talk about the impact of the alternative minimum tax on this bill. Because, as the gentleman from…”

“Mr. Speaker, let me talk about the impact of the alternative minimum tax on this bill. Because, as the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Archer) knows, I have been speaking out about this for the past few years, and it is time to eliminate the alternative minimum tax. It no longer performs the function it was intended to and, in my view, has perverse consequences in the tax system. Now, laying that aside, let me tell my colleagues that I had a call this week from a Republican interest group asking me to support this bill. The rationale was the statistic that they were offering that suggested that 61,386 married couples in my district were affected by the marriage penalty. When I asked how many would not get any benefit from the Republican bill because of the alternative minimum tax, they did not know; and they did not know because they did not care. They saw this then and they see this today as a purely political issue. Now, is the AMT a minor flaw in this bill? Absolutely not. It would cost $65 billion to fix the problem. To put it another way, the Republican bill promised about $250 billion of tax relief and, by sleight of hand, uses the AMT to take back $65 billion, or 26 percent of the benefit. This is not a small problem. It is a known problem. It is a fixable problem. But in this legislation that they are offering, it is not fixed.”